How can I get the current network interface throughput statistics on Linux UNIX

Question

Tools such as MRTG provide network throughput   bandwidth graphs for the current network utilisation on specific interfaces  such as eth0  How can I return that information at the command line on Linux UNIX   Preferably this would be without installing anything other than what is available on the system as standard

User · Accepted Answer

You can parse the output of ifconfig

User · Answer

Besides iftop and iptraf  also check    bwm-ng  Bandwidth Monitor Next Generation    and or   cbm  Color Bandwidth Meter    ref  http   www powercram com 2010 01 bandwidth-monitoring-tools-for-ubuntu html

User · Answer

I find dstat to be quite good  Has to be installed though  Gives you way more information than you need  Netstat will give you packet rates but not bandwith also  netstat -s

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I couldn t get the parse ifconfig script to work for me on an AMI so got this to work measuring received traffic averaged over 10 seconds  date  amp  amp  rxstart  ifconfig eth0   grep bytes   awk   print  2     cut -d   -f 2   amp  amp  sleep 10  amp  amp  rxend  ifconfig eth0   grep bytes   awk   print  2     cut -d   -f 2   amp  amp  difference  expr  rxend -  rxstart   amp  amp  echo  Received  expr  difference   10  bytes per sec    Sorry  it s ever so cheap and nasty but it worked

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iftop does for network usage what top 1  does for CPU usage -- http   www ex-parrot com  pdw iftop   I don t know how  standard  iftop is  but I was able to install it with yum install iftop on Fedora

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I got another quick n dirty bash script for that      bin bash IF  1 if   -z   IF     then         IF  ls -1  sys class net    head -1  fi RXPREV -1 TXPREV -1 echo  Listening  IF     while   1    1     do         RX  cat  sys class net   IF  statistics rx bytes          TX  cat  sys class net   IF  statistics tx bytes          if    RXPREV -ne -1     then                 let BWRX  RX- RXPREV                 let BWTX  TX- TXPREV                 echo  Received   BWRX B s    Sent   BWTX B s          fi         RXPREV  RX         TXPREV  TX         sleep 1 done   It s considering that sleep 1 will actually last exactly one second  which is not true  but good enough for a rough bandwidth assessment   Thanks to  ephemient for the  sys class net  lt interface gt

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I wrote this dumb script a long time ago  it depends on nothing but Perl and Linux ge 2 6      usr bin perl  use strict  use warnings   use POSIX qw strftime   use Time  HiRes qw gettimeofday usleep    my  dev    ARGV   shift    eth0   my  dir     sys class net  dev statistics   my  stats   do       opendir   my  dh    dir      local      readdir  dh      closedir  dh      map            grep                     if  -t STDOUT        while  1            print   033 H 033 J   run            my   time   us    gettimeofday            my   sec   min   hour    localtime  time                        local      1              printf   -31 31s   02d  02d  02d  06d 8s 8s 8s 8s                dev   hour   min   sec   us  qw 1s 5s 15s 60s                    usleep  us   1000000 -  us   1000000           else  print run     sub run       map           chomp  my   stat    slurp   dir                my  line   sprintf   -31 31s  16 16s        stat           line    sprintf   8 8s   int    stat -  stats    - gt  0     1              if    stats       gt  0           line    sprintf   8 8s   int    stat -  stats    - gt  4     5              if    stats       gt  4           line    sprintf   8 8s   int    stat -  stats    - gt  14     15              if    stats       gt  14           line    sprintf   8 8s   int    stat -  stats    - gt  59     60              if    stats       gt  59          unshift    stats        stat          pop    stats      if    stats       gt  60            line n         sort keys  stats     sub slurp       local  ARGV           local       lt  gt               It just reads from  sys class net  dev statistics every second  and prints out the current numbers and the average rate of change       net stats pl eth0 rx bytes                          74457040115259 4369093 4797875 4206554 364088 rx packets                           91215713193   23120   23502   23234  17616     tx bytes                          90798990376725 8117924 7047762 7472650 319330 tx packets                           93139479736   23401   22953   23216  23171     eth0                             15 22 09 002216      1s      5s     15s     60s                                    current reading   -------- averages ---------

User · Answer

You could parse  proc net dev

User · Answer

nload is a great tool for monitoring bandwidth in real time and easily installed in Ubuntu or Debian with sudo apt-get install nload   Device eth0  10 10 10 5   1 2                                                                                         Incoming                                                                                                                                                                            Curr  2 07 MBit s                                                                     Avg  1 41 MBit s                                                                     Min  1 12 kBit s                                                                     Max  4 49 MBit s                                                                     Ttl  1 94 GByte Outgoing                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Curr  63 88 MBit s                                                                     Avg  32 04 MBit s                                                                     Min  0 00 Bit s                                                                     Max  93 23 MBit s                                                                     Ttl  2 49 GByte   Another excellent tool is iftop  also easily apt-get able                191Mb      381Mb                 572Mb       763Mb             954Mb       -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- box4 local              gt  box-2 local                      91 0Mb  27 0Mb  15 1Mb                        lt                                    1 59Mb   761kb   452kb box4 local              gt  box local                         560b   26 8kb  27 7kb                        lt                                     880b   31 3kb  32 1kb box4 local              gt  userify com                         0b   11 4kb  8 01kb                        lt                                    1 17kb  2 39kb  1 75kb box4 local              gt  b resolvers Level3 net              0b     58b    168b                        lt                                       0b     83b    288b box4 local              gt  stackoverflow com                   0b     42b     21b                        lt                                       0b     42b     21b box4 local              gt  224 0 0 251                         0b      0b    179b                        lt                                       0b      0b      0b 224 0 0 251             gt  box-2 local                         0b      0b      0b                        lt                                       0b      0b     36b 224 0 0 251             gt  box local                           0b      0b      0b                        lt                                       0b      0b     35b   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TX            cum    37 9MB   peak    91 0Mb     rates    91 0Mb  27 1Mb  15 2Mb RX                   1 19MB           1 89Mb              1 59Mb   795kb   486kb TOTAL                39 1MB           92 6Mb              92 6Mb  27 9Mb  15 6Mb   Don t forget about the classic and powerful sar and netstat utilities on older  nix

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Got sar   Likely yes if youre using RHEL CentOS     No need for priv  dorky binaries  hacky scripts  libpcap  etc   Win     sar -n DEV 1 3 Linux 2 6 18-194 el5  localhost localdomain     10 27 2010  02 40 56 PM     IFACE   rxpck s   txpck s   rxbyt s   txbyt s   rxcmp s   txcmp s  rxmcst s 02 40 57 PM        lo      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00 02 40 57 PM      eth0  10700 00   1705 05 15860765 66 124250 51      0 00      0 00      0 00 02 40 57 PM      eth1      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00  02 40 57 PM     IFACE   rxpck s   txpck s   rxbyt s   txbyt s   rxcmp s   txcmp s  rxmcst s 02 40 58 PM        lo      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00 02 40 58 PM      eth0   8051 00   1438 00 11849206 00 105356 00      0 00      0 00      0 00 02 40 58 PM      eth1      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00  02 40 58 PM     IFACE   rxpck s   txpck s   rxbyt s   txbyt s   rxcmp s   txcmp s  rxmcst s 02 40 59 PM        lo      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00 02 40 59 PM      eth0   6093 00   1135 00 8970988 00  82942 00      0 00      0 00      0 00 02 40 59 PM      eth1      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00  Average         IFACE   rxpck s   txpck s   rxbyt s   txbyt s   rxcmp s   txcmp s  rxmcst s Average            lo      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00 Average          eth0   8273 24   1425 08 12214833 44 104115 72      0 00      0 00      0 00 Average          eth1      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00      0 00

User · Answer

dstat - Combines vmstat  iostat  ifstat  netstat information and more  iftop - Amazing network bandwidth utility to analyse what is really happening on your eth  netio - Measures the net throughput of a network via TCP IP  inq - CLI troubleshooting utility that displays info on storage  typically Symmetrix  By default  INQ returns the device name  Symmetrix ID  Symmetrix LUN  and capacity  send arp - Sends out an arp broadcast on the specified network device  defaults to eth0   reporting an old and new IP address mapping to a MAC address  EtherApe - is a graphical network monitor for Unix modeled after etherman  Featuring link layer  IP and TCP modes  it displays network activity graphically  iptraf - An IP traffic monitor that shows information on the IP traffic passing over your network    More details  http   felipeferreira net  p 1194

User · Answer

ifconfig -a ip -d link ls -l  sys class net   physical and virtual devices  route -n   If you want the output of  ifconfig -a  in json format you can use this  python

User · Answer

I like iptraf but you probably have to install it and it seems to not being maintained actively anymore

User · Answer

You can use iperf to benchmark network performance  maximum possible throughput   See following links for details   http   en wikipedia org wiki Iperf  https   iperf fr   https   code google com p iperf

User · Answer

If you want just to get the value  you can use simple shell oneliner like this   S 10  F  sys class net eth0 statistics rx bytes  X  cat  F   sleep  S  Y  cat  F   BPS      Y-X  S     echo  BPS   It will show you the average  received bytes per second  for period of 10 seconds  you can change period by changing S 10 parameter  and you can measure transmitted BPS instead of received BPS by using tx bytes instead of rx bytes   Don t forget to change eth0 to network device you want to monitor   Of course  you are not limited to displaying the average rate  as mentioned in other answers  there are other tools that will show you much nicer output   but this solution is easily scriptable to do other things    For example  the following shell script  split into multiple lines for readability  will execute offlineimap process only when 5-minute average transmit speed drops below 10kBPS  presumably  when some other bandwidth-consuming process finishes       bin sh S 300  F  sys class net eth0 statistics tx bytes BPS 999999 while    BPS -gt 10000   do   X  cat  F   sleep  S  Y  cat  F   BPS      Y-X  S       echo BPS is currently  BPS done offlineimap   Note that  sys class     is Linux specific  which is ok as submitter did choose linux tag   and needs non-archaic kernel  Shell code itself is  bin sh compatible  so not only bash  but dash and other  bin sh implementations will work  and  bin sh is something that is really always installed

[linux] How can I get the current network interface throughput statistics on Linux/UNIX?

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